Definitions of autonomy vary. True autonomy is far away. He gives the example of a car performing well on an interstate or in light traffic compared to driving through the center of Rome during rush hour.

Automation will fail. And the less it fails, the less prepared the driver is to assume control.

Emotionally we cannot accept autonomous cars that kill people, even if it reduces overall crash rates and saves lives in the long run.

It is difficult to run simulations with the autonomous cars that capture the extreme variability of the human drivers in other cars.

I’ll leave you with the last paragraph in the interview as a summary:

So to sum this thing up, I think there’s a general desire from the technical people in this field to have both the press and particularly the public better educated about what’s really going on. It’s very easy to get misunderstandings based on words like or phrases like “full autonomy.” What does full actually mean? This actually matters a lot: The idea that only the chauffeur mode of autonomy, where the car drives for you, that that’s the only way to make the car safer and to save lives, that’s just false. And it’s important to not say, “We want to save lives therefore we have to have driverless cars.” In particular, there are tremendous numbers of ways to support a human driver and to give them a kind of blunder prevention device which sits there, inactive most of the time, and every once in a while, will first warn and then, if necessary, intervene and take control. The system doesn’t need to be competent at everything all of the time. It needs to only handle the worst cases.